Abstract

The Middle Dutch verse romance Segheliin van Iherusalem has survived in the following known extant copies: a manuscript (Berlin, Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, MS. Germ. fol. 922, fos. 71r.-122v., on the basis of the watermarks dated by the present author c. 1412-15); an incunabulum (Ghent University Library, Res. 1405 (between 1483 and 1486)); five post-incunabula, all printed in Antwerp (1511-40) and now in The Hague (2 copies), Leiden, Vienna and Paris; and a mid fifteenth-century excerpt (Brussels, Royal Library, Hs. II 116, fos. 2v.-5r.). These sources, all rhyming texts, are described here, and the excerpt is given in full. The gap still facing students of the Segheliin has thus been filled. Both manuscript and incunabulum are incomplete at the end. The text in the sixteenth-century editions differs widely from that of the manuscript version. For its part the incunabulum departs from the text of the post-incunabula with a version (perhaps closer to the original?) which in very many places tends towards the manuscript version, being something of a watershed between the two traditions. Preliminary investigation of the linguistic levels in the text, carried out on the basis of changes in the rhyme words, points to a Flemish and probably more specifically west or south-west Flemish base level (possibly the area where Ingvaonic and Brabantish meet (the region of the Dender), above which there is at least a Brabantish level. This fact, combined with the possibility of an interpretation of the Segheliin to some extent in terms of the context of the medieval veneration of the Cross and the Blood of Christ, more than suggests that the story is of Flemish origin.